


By Any Other Name

by pixie_rings



Category: Free!
Genre: F/M, The Name Thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 20:02:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5428913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pixie_rings/pseuds/pixie_rings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For as long as she could remember, she'd hated her name.</p><p>Maybe, though, it's not so bad after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

> I was not expecting my first fic in this fandom to be het, but here we are. I squeezed out some vague introspection because Gou is a cutie and she and Seijuuro are so adorable.

For as long as she could remember, she'd hated her name.

Their father had chosen it, because their mother had chosen Rin's. Their mother had openly admitted, when Gou was about eleven, that Toraichi had wanted to name Rin that, but as they'd never expected to have another child, much less a girl, Rin had been Rin and Gou had been Gou. Their mother had told her to be proud of her name, her eyes a little too bright, like they always were when she talked about their father. Gou had secretly hated him for it, and wanted to be _Kou_.

When she'd been seven, they'd picked on her at school for it; they'd called her a boy and lifted up her skirt, “to check!” they'd jeered, cruel as only children could be. She'd punched them. Rin had found it hilarious when their mother had been called to the school and she'd tearfully admitted everything. Even though their mother had said she'd been in trouble in the headmaster's office, when she'd gotten home, she'd had an extra-big slice of cake for dessert and had been allowed to go to bed an hour later than usual.

Rin has never called her anything else. She will always be Gou, and strangely enough, she wouldn't want him calling her anything else. He would call her Kou, if she asked, she's certain, but she wouldn't ask. He's _Onii-chan_ , she's _Gou_ , that's just how it is, and how it always will be. There's an odd comfort in that, as if there's always someone who will just see her for who she is. She doesn't know why she feels that way, but it's something that niggles at the back of her mind.

She always introduces herself as _Kou_. People who haven't known her since childhood call her that, but in Iwatobi, those are few and far between. Teachers look at the register and forget themselves. Chigusa always forgets, and it annoys Gou, but, well... Chigusa is her best friend. Every time it happens Gou resolves that she'll start calling Chigusa some ridiculous variation of her name, but she always forgets.

Makoto calls her _Kou_. He's nice like that, he listens to people and does all he can to make them feel comfortable (unless it's to do with Haru, public indecency and water, then Haru has to remain uncomfortable, thank you very much). It takes her a while to actually answer to it. It doesn't feel quite right, but she pretends to like it more.

Haruka's track record is less... consistent. Sometimes she's _Kou_ – usually after Makoto has called her that – sometimes she's Gou. She answers to both, just to keep things simple, because Haru has more important things on his mind.

Nagisa... he's a lost cause. She'll always be _Gou-chan_ to him, no matter what she says. They'll be eighty and bent double with age and she'll still be _Gou-chan_. She privately thinks he does it on purpose, it would be like him. He enjoys winding people up, baiting them good-naturedly, if Rei is anything to go by. It's how he shows affection. She grits her teeth and bears it.

Rei is just as polite as Makoto, but not quite enough: there's a -san on the end, like for her brother, but it's still Gou.

None of this truly matters, until she meets _him_.

It's at Samezuka Academy when she first gets referred to with _-kun_. It's the most humiliating moment of her life. It's everything she's fought against, everything that makes her angry, it's the memories of playground taunts and flipped skirts and cruel giggles. It's the thing that made her _Kou_ , not Gou.

And yet he's still there, one hundred and eighty-seven centimetres by seventy-seven kilograms of him, still calling her _Gou-kun_. He wears a stupid grin and laughs like an idiot and looks at her like she holds the answers to all life's questions, and she _hates_ him.

She could like him, she tells herself when she's at home thinking about how they met at the shopping centre, how his cheeks had flushed and he'd looked at her like she was something special (because sometimes you miss that when you're constantly surrounded by boys who definitely prefer other boys). She could, if only he'd call her Kou.

She doesn't see him again for a while, and when she does, he's still as tall, still weighs the same, is still an idiot. And he still calls her _Gou-kun_ , like she's some sort of boy. “Gou!” she corrects, irritably, before remembering it's supposed to be _Kou_. Funny, though, she didn't remember his smiling being that pleasant. He could be tolerable, if only he'd drop the _-kun_. At least his brother puts _-san_ on the end.

Eventually they bump into each other, when he's home for some sort of break. She's at university, she's doing medicine, specialising in myology, of course. He grins at her, and it's like the sun came out after a storm. For the first time, she blushes, and for the first time, she thinks she could like him, even without him dropping the _-kun_.

.

She has been _Gou_ again for some time. She thinks that, maybe, she's _always_ been Gou, and that _Kou_ was someone, some _thing_ , she _wanted_ to be, but couldn't ever really be. She looks back and is glad she never continued to be _Kou_ , she didn't think she was really all that great. _Gou_ is strong, independent, knows what she wants, speaks her mind, gets along in her career. _Kou_ seemed... well, looking back, _Kou_ seemed pretty limp, like some shoujo manga protagonist, an everygirl. Rin could see through it, and _he_ could too.

She's Gou to Haru, Makoto and Rei (he's finally dropped the _-san_ ), and to Nagisa she'll never be anything but _Gou-chan_. At work she's _Matsuoka-sensei_ , for the most part, except for the one other female doctor, who calls her _Gou-san_ – but Gou calls her _Shiori-san_ in a show of sisterly solidarity: they're united against the horde of men, and find allies where they can. Sousuke calls her like Rin does, which makes sense, since they're family now, and they've known each other since they were children. Momotarou calls her _Nee-chan_ as a joke sometimes, but mostly it's still Gou – with _-chan_ instead of _-san_. Kaguya calls her _mama_ , she's still very young and 'kaa' is a difficult sound to say.

Once, Makoto asked her why she decided she preferred _Gou_ again. Gou shrugged, saying she just felt like it. Her answer is her own to keep, she thinks, no one else needs to know it. Not even the reason himself.

She decided she most definitely _did_ like him, even if he used _-kun_. Maybe it was the way he'd said her name when she agreed to marry him, like he'd uttered the word that brought the universe into existence. Maybe it's the way he calls her name when Kaguya does something he finds amazing or entertaining, as if he could weep with gratitude over the existence of the both of them. Or maybe it's just the way he says her name, softly, like a small prayer, uttered against her skin in the early mornings. The finer points don't matter, but the reason she is _Gou_ and always will be is because Seijuuro loves Gou.


End file.
